I’ve been informed by my security team that Stanford administrators will not be ejecting students who disrupt my event tonight.
This is in violation of the policy that Stanford administrators themselves enunciated just one week ago:
“Advancing free speech and inclusion,” by Marc Tessier-Lavigne, President, and Persis Drell, Provost, Notes from the Quad, November 7, 2017:
…What is not acceptable is to disrupt speakers and not allow them to speak. This is inconsistent with our values and carries consequences as a violation of the university’s Fundamental Standard and Code of Conduct….
So for all their talk about the freedom of speech and diversity of opinion, apparently Tessier-Lavigne and Drell are fine with the event tonight becoming a circus of virtue-signalling fascists demonstrating how woke they are by screaming at me for an hour and a half, as happened last April at my event at the University at Buffalo.
I hope that as many students as possible who support the event will show up tonight and prevent this from happening, and allow for a rational discussion of the matters at hand.
In The Coming of the Third Reich, historian Richard J. Evans explains how, in the early days of National Socialist Germany, Stormtroopers (Brownshirts) “organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers [and] staged mass disruptions of their lectures.” We have seen just that play out at Stanford: a massive and libelous smear campaign in the Stanford student press, and now the possible disruption of the event itself.
Forcibly suppressing the speech of those with whom one disagrees is a quintessentially fascist act. And it is inimical to the very idea of a university, which is supposed to be a place where ideas are accepted or rejected on their merit alone, after rational evaluation, discussion, and debate.
Tessier-Lavigne and Drell should resign immediately. That is, if Stanford still has any interest in being an institution of higher learning, but it looks as if that ship sailed long ago.
High-tail it to those safe spaces, snowflakes: I’m coming in anyway. I’m bringing something you’re unfamiliar with: the truth. If you fascists of Stanford don’t entirely shout me down, I will tell that truth to you. But I’m ready for anything.